Tempus fugit, non autem memoria

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EDIT: From the Williams family, from my sister and from myself, I want to thank everyone who has expressed concern and/or lent support to Aidan during this time. Your words of encouragement, your prayers and your donations are helping more than words can say...especially now.

Aidan passed away on October 15, 2007 at 11:17pm. His life was cruelly short, and there is no sense to be made of his death...but even during his brief stay with us he touched lives: across the country, across the continent, even across the world. Never will he be forgotten.

The Williamses are understandably shattered right now, unable to fully cope with what has happened. Over the course of Aidan's battle with MIO, they have moved cross-country, accrued thousands of dollars in debt and been forced to deal with a tragedy that no one should ever have to endure. Please, if you have planned to give to them in order to help with their little one, do not decide against it because Aidan isn't with us any more. They still need your help -- now more than ever.

Godspeed, little one.

This is basically a standing cry for help. The Williamses are dear friends of my sister, Charlie. When I heard of Aidan's situation, I vowed to help in any way I could.

Please Help Aidan!!

Valery and Corey Williams were blessed with their first child, a beautiful baby boy, Aidan Randall Williams, on March 10, 2007. They currently reside in Monroe, Louisiana.

In July 2007, Aidan was diagnosed with a rare, fatal genetic disorder called malignant infantile osteopetrosis, in which an enzyme in his bone marrow does not function. The only possible cure for this disease is a bone marrow transplant. However, the cost of the procedure is more than double what insurance will cover. The insurance also will not cover any medications or prescription costs. In addition, the family must move to Minnesota for several months while Aidan is being treated.

We are looking to you for any assistance you can give to help with these overwhelming expenses. Anything you can donate is immensely appreciated. Please help us save their little miracle—he needs you!

Thank you and God Bless!

Donations can be made at any Chase Bank location. In Columbia, donations can be made at the Citizens Progressive Bank. Just state that you want to make a donation or deposit to the Aidan Williams Benefit Account.

So it’s over. The Spring 2008 Sarasota Medieval Fair. Date: April 5th and 6th, 2008. Theme: Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Place: Robarts Sports Arena, Sarasota, Florida. This thing that has eaten the last three months of my life. The first Medieval Fair that I have been part of as an actor.

I’m sitting at my desk, still in costume. My lovely tunic that I paid someone to make for me has been ripped open. I’m covered in Karo syrup, because at one point I had to die, and it had to be spectacular. I’m sunburnt, blistered, filthy, exhausted, and working on one HELL of a case of heat rash.

I’ve never been happier in my life.

I have been introduced to an entire world of camraderie, teamwork, artistic license, and love. I feel like I’ve gained a family. I feel like I’ve been part of something much bigger than I, and while it may sound pretentious, I felt like I was an important enough part of it that had I not been there it would have had a quite different feel. Of course, it would still have been a spectacular show, with all its major elements intact, but I feel that I, like every other cast member, contributed just enough of myself to make it that much more special.

There’s something about being a part of a successful theatrical production, I’ve found, that can be quite intoxicating. Oh, yes, make no mistake -- this was theater from start to finish. The difference in this case is that your stage is not confined to one end of an auditorium. No, this stage is everywhere -- in and out and around the "lanes", which are the walkways between the stage acts and vendor booths, the human chessboard (which I’ll get to in a minute), the small areas behind the stages...everywhere. Any time you’re not in the ’green room’, you’re on and in character. You have no script, no omnipresent director telling you exactly how to interpret each scenario, no chance for a second take. You’re out in the thick of it, bam, here’s the audience, they’re all around you, and they’re looking to you to provide them with an avenue of escape from their lives, asking you to enable their suspension of disbelief for a few hours. In a way, you’re their reprieve. You’re their doorway into another world, and you have to create that world on the fly from word one. Of course there’s a framework, a given scenario from which you build, but that’s where it ends.

Perhaps it sounds dreadful. Perhaps it sounds like too much pressure. It may sound like something impossible to achieve and maintain. It sounded that way to me at first. But I tell you -- as one who, a scant six months ago, was on the outside looking in -- once you’re there, and you hear yourself greeting entering patrons in this accent that sounds ridiculous to your own ears, but you see their faces relax and smile back and acknowledge you and begin to enjoy themselves.....that, my friends, is a good feeling. You begin to think, "Hell yeah...I can do this!" And you go off to find one of your fellow performers so the two of you can spontaneously invent a bit act to perform for the patrons, and when they stop and watch you and laugh at all the right spots, and even start to involve themselves in your little shenanigans, and applaud you when you’re done....there’s that good feeling again.

And the human chess match! God, I haven’t had that much fun -- legally -- in years. A life-sized chessboard, 48 feet square, each square occupied by a living person. Every time a piece takes another, it’s a glorious battle to the death. And I got to fight.

Let me say that again. I. Got. To FIGHT.

My fight was against our Little John, played by a man that I am not only taller than but outweigh by about 30 pounds. Hence, the name given to me by our director -- wait for it -- "BIG John". Our fight was not the most spectacular, but it was a good freaking match. We both used staves, a weapon I am more than comfortable with, and by GOD it felt good to run out there and swing that sucker around like I knew what the hell I was doing. The actor I was paired up against has been doing these kinds of fights for years, and he was more than willing to patiently work with me on the things I needed to know to both fight safely and make it look like we were really pounding the hell out of each other. We spent enough time in practice to get a feel for how each other worked as a fighter (most of the featured fights in a chess match are choreographed, by and large, by the fighters themselves), and we even came up with our own dialogue to spout during our match. And in the end -- glee! -- I got to die. Oh, it was great.

All of these things are wonderful experiences by themselves, but when they’re all packaged together in this one hectic weekend of hellacious seat-of-the-pants brouhaha, it becomes an unforgettable experience that you would do anything to extend or repeat. Fortunately, we get to do just that -- our show was a rip-roaring success, so we’ll be putting on another one this November. We don’t yet have all the details, but we do know this much: Vikings. ’nuff said.

One of the best moments today? After our big climactic chess match, as I was off by the privy trying to rinse Karo syrup out of my hair, a mother and daughter came up to me and told me that they’d been attending Medieval Fairs for years, and that this was one of the best Med Fairs they’d ever seen.

EVER. God, I’m going to be high off that one for days, I can tell.

If you’re reading this, O spring ’08 cast: I love you guys. You are all -- each and every one of you -- a joy to work with. You have made this into a life-changing experience for me, at the risk of sounding melodramatic. And -- make no mistake -- I will definitely be there for August casting.

From the Williams family, from my sister and from myself, I want to thank everyone who has expressed concern and/or lent support to Aidan Williams during this time. Your words of encouragement, your prayers and your donations are helping more than words can say...especially now.

Aidan passed away on October 15, 2007 at 11:17pm. His life was cruelly short, and there is no sense to be made of his death...but even during his brief stay with us he touched lives: across the country, across the continent, even across the world. Never will he be forgotten.

The Williamses are understandably shattered right now, unable to fully cope with what has happened. Over the course of Aidan's battle with MIO, they have moved cross-country, accrued thousands of dollars in debt and been forced to deal with a tragedy that no one should ever have to endure. Please, if you have planned to give to them in order to help with their little one, do not decide against it because Aidan isn't with us any more. They still need your help -- now more than ever.

[Error: unknown template qotd]Eh. Favorite? I don't usually have a 'favorite' celebrity, but....I guess if I had to pick one it would be Shia LaBeouf. Granted, I'm getting sick of seeing him every-frikkin-where, but there's a reason he's getting so much work: he's just that damn good.

Least favorite is a three-way tie between Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Kim Kardashian. If I never have to hear about these substance-dependent talentless diease tunnels ever again, it'll be a good day.

Comment and I'll:1. Tell you why I friended you.2. Associate you with something - a song, a color, a photo, etc.3. Tell you something I like about you.4. Tell you a memory I have of you.5. Associate you with a character.6. Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.7. Tell you my favorite user picture of yours.8. In return, you should post this in your LJ.

At this moment, I am more drunk than I have ever been in my entire life.

I am typing this entry to test my cognitive abilities. I hate -- I DESPISE -- the lack of control over my motor skills, the inability to form coherent sentences in my mind before submitting them to the screen. I cannot feel my lips, and my fingers are not far behind them. Even now, I have had to correct my spelling, grammar, and sentence structure more times than I ever have before. I keep having to backspace, delete and re-type. Not a good sign for someone who prides hmself in his grammatical ability -- not to mention his restraint.

What have I had to drink? Well, let's see if I can remember, or even relate the list coherently: I've been downing Jell-O shots since about 6:30 (it's about 11:30 now), slammed down 4 (maybe 5?) Irish Car Bombs, and done 4.5 shots of Cuervo.

I don't usually drink -- for this very reason. I hate this feeling. I am in control of nothing; not my motor skills, not my communictive abilities, nothing. I feel like I'm numb from the lips down. I've torn my pants at the crotch (my ONLY serviceable pair of work pants), and I'm still too drunk to noticeably care until tomorrow.

I have typed this entry in varying degrees of sobriety throughout the night. It was started at 12:13am and finished at 5:32. Why have I done this? It is my friend's birthday; I have submitted to the wiles of social pressure and imbibed more than I would ever have done on my own. This is a party, yes; the type of undertaking I would have shunned as little as three years ago, and now it pervades the very house I live in. To be fair, the house is not mine, nor am I renting it; the right to organize and host such a gathering lies with my roommate and friend. Still, I have partaken of the evening's festivities far more than I might otherwise have done. Why, you might ask, have I done this?

Because I want to belong. I want to have a large number of people that care about my life enough to show up at my house and make total asses out of themselves. I want to be able to get drunk enough to entertain an entire room and have them love me for it. I want everything I have never had or been.

But I don't.

But I do.

I am mostly sober now. Have I deteriorated to the point that I must be inebriated to be honest with myself?

There are a lot of people in my hometown that I haven't talked to or seen in 10 years or more. People I liked. People I held dear to me and thought of as lifelong friends. People I had adolescent crushes on, waaaay back in the days of slimmer waistlines and fewer gray areas in life. People I had more than just a simple crush on -- and some of them, I daresay, never had a clue.

I lost touch with most of them when I left Sarasota. I wanted to get out of that place so badly -- I felt my continued presence there to be a malicious thing, crushing me inexorably from within. This was not because of the friends I had there -- not at all -- but despite them. I hated that town with a searing, blinding passion. Part of me still wants to. It would be so easy to just slip back in to that easy cycle of malcontent... but I am choosing (choosing, mind you) to not do so.

And I did hate it. I hated Sarasota for never and always changing. I hated it for being smug and arrogant about itself and the money that simply oozed from every edifice on city street corners while not two blocks away you could find a drug deal being made in broad daylight, or a weary whore desperate for a five-dollar john. The way the city was so proud of its marina, or Saint Armand's Circle, or its two hospitals, or the obscenely affluent suburban areas that litter its landscape like a spread of expensive garbage. But I knew that if you looked closely enough, you would find the "real" Sarasota: homeless derelicts huddled under the Saint Armand's bridge, the run-down duplexes that branch off from East Road, the seedy bowling alley over by Publix near the jail. I always felt that Sarasota was an aged whore under a fresh coat of overdone makeup. Scratch that beautiful facade and just underneath you find the ugly truth.

See, in the 10 years or so since I last lived in Sarasota, I've seen and done many, many things. I don't flatter myself with the delusion that I am a wise man, or even a worldly one. But I've had experiences: I've been married, and subsequently divorced. I've broken several hearts and had my heart broken several times. I've seized some opportunities while letting others slip away. I've faced mounting debt, dealt with the cycles of work and sleep and living from paycheck to paycheck. I've been impoverished, and I've been comfortable. I've lived with (I almost said "battled", but most of the time I haven't fought hard enough to deserve the term) severe depression for my entire life, and it has affected those around me and those far from me; those in my life that I have cherished above all else have been burned by the pyre of self-pity that often accompanies depression.

(I hate self-pity. And hypocrisy. Particularly in myself.)

But now -- now I find myself returning. After 10 years (christ!) I am finally coming back to my hometown, the place I grew up. The town in which I got into my first fight. The streets on which I looked for new friends to play with every time we moved to a new house. The house in which I lost my virginity. The street corner (Tuttle and 17th) where I very nearly died. The downtown area, Main Street, where I had my very first job -- as a telemarketer. (Explains so much, doesn't it?) The mall -- that bloated, decrepit whore of a mall -- where I had so many different jobs. The church where I got married. The parking lot in which I proposed to my future wife. Memories and experiences assail me from every front in this place, and so many of them are not good memories that I have always found it easier to (if not impossible to avoid) focusing exclusively on those negative impressions.

You know what I've realized, though? I never hated Sarasota. Not a bit of it. I disliked it, certainly, for the reasons I've listed as well as a few I haven't -- but hate? No. Not hate for Sarasota. The hate I had -- and have -- was and is for everything I saw about Sarasota reflected in myself. The hypocrisy. The mistakes. The lies. The dual nature of the place. All of it I had incorporated into myself, and I couldn't stand to be reminded of the fact every time I saw another homeless woman scrounging for food in the dumpsters behind Michael's On East. So I wanted to leave, get away, get out of that place and away from its silent accusations. Where to go? Anywhere. Gainesville. North Carolina. Anywhere.

But I'm tired of running. I see people I knew and worked with now, today, particularly on MySpace -- and they have wonderful jobs, beautiful children, they're raising families. They're pursuing dreams, or helping other people achieve theirs. I am humbled by what I see when I look at their pictures -- they're smiling so widely, so happily. They look happy with how their lives have gone and are going. I know that such is probably not the universal case, but in comparison...

Well, I'm doing what I always do. I'm determining the quality of my life by comparing it to others'. Foolish habit to have, but one that can be hard to control if you don't recognize it for what it is in its early stages.

The upshot is: you win, Sarasota. I'm coming back. I always said you were a tar-baby, and damn if I'm not proving myself right. I may not have made the most of my attempt at sorting out this mess out here that you call "life", but perhaps if I return to square one -- you -- I can start over fresh. Or at least as fresh as I can at the ripe old age of 29.